Unmanned aircraft vessel, unmanned land vehicle, and unmanned marine vessel are types of vehicles that move autonomously without human pilot, either autonomously on a pre-programmed path or steered from remote. These vehicles could operate respectively in the air, on the land, on sea, or on inland water. The vehicles typically have an own engine respectively jet, propeller, wheel, crawler, propeller screw, or hover propulsion and gear. These are vehicles are known under the generic term mobile robots.
The increasing capabilities, high movability and the recently decreasing price of mobile robots suggest utilizing mobile robots also in new deployment areas, for example in wireless communication networks.
There are situations when the need for network capacity grows rapidly and it is urgent to create more and/or remote network coverage in an ad-hoc fashion. This could be caused by a movement of people like evacuation, road jam, or huge public events. Today there is a need to install base stations or wireless access points at these places and connect them with the wireless communication network. This is however sometimes impossible due to character of the terrain or area property, or simply because the network coverage or network capacity demands change too fast or unexpected.
A utilization of mobile robots in mobile communication networks promises several benefits such as quick deployment, quick withdrawal, and high coverage flexibility. In order to achieve these benefits appropriate methods and devices are needed that enable provisioning of coverage of a wireless communication network with the help of mobile robots and ways to maintain the achieved coverage also in cases that mobile robots fail unexpectedly or have to be periodically recharged/refueled.